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Examines the role of employee gender in the performance attribution process. Seeks to determine whether library managers attribute a job performance by a woman to different causes then the job performance of a man; whether differences in attributions are attenuated as managers gain more extensive work experience with their supervisors; whether library supervisors performance attributions are related to judgements regarding subordinates career advancement prospects.

Research has suggested that employees interpret high-performance work systems (HPWSs) as targeting two distinct organizational objectives: enhancing performance and promoting employee well-being. These attributions often exert divergent effects on employee attitudes. Thus, this study aims to investigate this dynamic within the context of the Korean nursing occupation, clarifying how the HPWS can simultaneously evoke dual attributions: human resource (HR) well-being and HR performance attributions. Additionally, the authors examine the contrasting effects of these attributions and identify a moderating variable that could reconcile them. Drawing on the psychological experience of status theory, the authors conceptualize and test the moderating effect of employees' self-perceived status on the relationship between HR performance attribution and affective commitment.

Data were collected from 475 nurses in 82 work units in Korean hospitals. Hypotheses were tested in a multilevel moderated mediation model.

The findings revealed that an HPWS elicits HR well-being and HR performance attributions. While HR well-being attribution was positively associated with affective commitment, HR performance attribution was positively related to affective commitment when employees' self-perceived status was high. Moreover, the HPWS demonstrated an indirect relationship with affective commitment via increasing HR performance attribution when self-perceived status was high.

Although the personal meaning of HR attributions differs depending on the perceiver’s situation, this aspect has received little attention in the field of research. This study advances the understanding of HR attributions derived from the HPWS within the specific context of Korean nursing. Furthermore, the authors suggest that the two attributions may not conflict with each other, indicating that the impact of HR performance attribution is conditional on an individual’s self-perceived status.

During a brand crisis, consumers construct attributions to understand the cause of the crisis and to assign blame, with attributions of blame to firms consequently lowering brand attitudes. The purpose of this paper is to explore attributions of blame in performance- versus values-related brand crisis. Do consumers assign different levels of blame to values- versus performance-related brand crises?

The authors conducted three experimental studies, plus one pilot study, with American, British and Australian participants in which they manipulated the type of brand crisis as values- or performance-related to determine the extent to which consumers attribute blame to the firm and the effects of those attributions on consumers’ brand attitudes.

Findings indicated that consumers assign more blame to firms for a values-related brand crisis than for a performance-related brand crisis.

The findings of this study explain how consumers are harsher towards firms that violate some moral or social standards than those that exhibit product defects.

For branding and public relations officials, finding greater internal attribution for values-related brand crises offers implications for how and what information about such crises ought to be conveyed to manage consumer response and brand reputation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the findings are the first to explore attributions in blame toward values- and performance-related brand crises.

Virtual kitchens are a new business phenomenon, and how customers react to the new business model is still a largely unexplored topic. The purpose of this study is to examine the underlying mechanisms of consumers’ different responses to their reasoning of the new and disruptive business model of the virtual kitchen.

Based on the attribution theory and situated focus theory of power, this study conducts three online experiments to test the proposed framework. A total of 487 US residents who had prior experience with restaurant food delivery participated in the studies.

The results indicate that external attribution (vs internal attribution) and ethnic cuisine (vs mainstream cuisine) are more likely to elicit customers’ empathy and justice, leading to higher purchase intentions with virtual kitchens. A mainstream virtual kitchen is better off attributing itself to external factors. The significant effects of causal attribution and cuisine type on purchase intention only exist with powerful customers and those with high moral identity.

The results of this study provide valuable insight to virtual kitchen businesses to better position and market themselves to gain customers’ support. The findings also suggest that ethnic and mainstream restaurants should strategize their marketing communications about virtual kitchens differently.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to provide in-depth insight into the growing phenomenon of virtual kitchens. It also contributes to the extant literature on attribution theory and situated focus theory of power.

Drawing on attribution theory, this study aims to examine how and when abusive supervision affects insubordination, focusing on employees’ attribution bias related to leader gender.

Two mixed-method studies were used to test the proposed research framework. Study 1 adopted a 2 (abusive supervision: low vs high) by 2 (leader gender: male vs female) by employee gender-leadership bias quasi-experiment. A sample of 173 US F&B employees completed Study 1. In Study 2, 116 hospitality employees responded to two-wave, time-lagged surveys. They answered questions on abusive supervision and gender-leadership bias in Survey 1. Two weeks later, they reported negative external attribution (embodied in injury initiation) and insubordination.

Hayes’ PROCESS macro results verified a three-way moderated mediation. The three-way interaction among abusive supervision, leader gender and gender-leadership bias affects external attribution, increasing insubordination. Employees with high leader–gender bias working under female leaders make more external attribution and engage in subsequent insubordination in the presence of abusive supervision.

This study is one of the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, that examines the mediating role of external attribution of abusive supervision. Second, this research explains the gender glass ceiling by examining employees’ attribution bias against female leaders.

As an emerging technology, medical artificial intelligence (AI) plays an important role in the healthcare system. However, the service failure of medical AI causes severe violations to user trust. Different from other services that do not involve vital health, customers' trust toward the service of medical AI are difficult to repair after service failure. This study explores the links among different types of attributions (external and internal), service recovery strategies (firm, customer, and co-creation), and service recovery outcomes (trust).

Empirical analysis was carried out using data (N = 338) collected from a 2 × 3 scenario-based experiment. The scenario-based experiment has three stages: service delivery, service failure, and service recovery. The attribution of service failure was divided into two parts (customer vs. firm), while the recovery of service failure was divided into three parts (customer vs. firm vs. co-creation), making the design full factorial.

The results show that (1) internal attribution of the service failure can easily repair both affective-based trust (AFTR) and cognitive-based trust (CGTR), (2) co-creation recovery has a greater positive effect on AFTR while firm recovery is more effective on cognitive-based trust, (3) a series of interesting conclusions are found in the interaction between customers' attribution and service recovery strategy.

The authors' findings are of great significance to the strategy of service recovery after service failure in the medical AI system. According to the attribution type of service failure, medical organizations can choose a strategy to more accurately improve service recovery effect.

As commercial cooking is known as a source that generates great concentrations of particulate matter (PM) emissions first accumulating in kitchens before spreading to dining areas, this study aims to explore how to improve restaurants’ efforts to reduce PM emissions by the application of attribution theory.

Data were obtained from restaurant managers operating their business in South Korea, considered to be qualified to provide accurate information regarding the survey questions. A scenario-based experimental approach was used to test the hypothesized relationships. Cognitive and emotional risk judgements were assessed for its potential interaction effects on the relationships between restaurant perceptions of PM source attributions, preventions attitudes and mitigation behavioral intentions.

Results revealed that perceptions of PM main sources were attributed to internal rather than external factors, which improved mitigation behavioral intentions. Such an effect was partially mediated through PM pollution prevention attitudes. Additionally, when applying external source attributions, PM mitigation behavioral intentions were improved by cognitive risk judgements, and PM prevention attitudes were enhanced by affective risk judgements.

Results assist restaurants to better understand their operations that may be emitting significant levels of PM, thereby encouraging them to set more ambitious and effective PM mitigation operational guidelines for their employees and diners.

This study provides a fundamental baseline of management perceptions regarding PM emissions related to restaurant mitigation behavioral intentions. Results are useful in designing appropriate communication strategies addressing restaurant PM pollution issues to improve internal restaurant practices regarding clean air quality.

Using social information processing and sense-making theory, the current study examines how the poly-contextual factors and social environment of employees provide unique cues and shape an employee's person-job (PJ) fit perceptions in ways that enable males to perceive a better PJ fit than their female counterparts at work. These perceptions of PJ fit act as mediating processes between gender-based differences in HR commitment or HR control attributions.

After collecting two waves of data over a six-month period from a sample of 498 banking sector professionals in Pakistan, the hypothesized relationships were tested using hierarchical multiple regression.

It was found that gender (female) was positively related to HR control attributions and negatively related to PJ fit perceptions and HR commitment attributions. The mean differences between males and females concerning these study variables were significant. Also, PJ fit mediated the relationship between gender and HR attributions.

The study contributes to the advancement and understanding of the predictors of HR attributions by examining the poly-contextual factors that shape unique experiences, knowledge structures and social information processing, thus forming distinct PJ fit perceptions and subsequent HR commitment or control attributions for males and females.

Organizational practitioners must often interpret accounts of workplace bullying. However, they are frequently reluctant to confirm the target's account and often fail to set effective intervention measures. Building on novel approaches in attribution theory, this study explores how causal explanations and blame pattern shape the labelling of a complaint and the subsequent recommended intervention measures.

187 Austrian human resource professionals, employee representatives and other practitioners were confronted with a fictional workplace bullying complaint including conflicting actors' accounts and diverse possible internal, relational and external causes. Since the prior low performance of a target might affect blame attributions, the previous performance ratings of the target were manipulated. Data were analysed via qualitative content analysis.

When respondents reject the complaint, they predominately identify single internal causes and blame the target, and/or trivialize the complaint as “normal conflict”. Both low and high performance of the target trigger (single) internal blame. When the complaint is supported, deontic statements and blame attributions against the perpetrator prevail; however, blame placed on the perpetrator is often discounted via multi-blame attributions towards supervisors, colleagues and the target. Structural causes were rarely mentioned. Relational attributions are infrequent and often used to trivialize the complaint. Irrespective of the attributional blame patterns, most third parties recommend “reconciliatory measures” (e.g. mediation) between the actors.

Trainings to temper single internal blaming and raise awareness of organizational intervention measures are essential.

This is the first study to investigate workplace bullying blaming patterns and organizational responses in detail.

Managing projects is an important part of operations management, but many projects fail. This study focuses on attribution processes of such disruption from the underrepresented perspective of the project manager. The authors consider two types of causes: the more frequently researched environmental uncertainty (i.e. uncontrollable events) and the scarcely researched uncertainty imposed by non-collaborative project sponsors (i.e. other-controllable events).

The authors test conceptual arguments grounded in attribution theory and the notion of psychological contracts in a scenario-based experiment among 325 practicing project managers.

The findings indicate that non-collaborative project sponsors negatively affect project managers' motivation, whereas uncontrollable disruptions leave hope to achieve positive future outcomes. This latter effect is further strengthened when project managers have an internal attribution style. They tend to blame the disruption on themselves and generally feel in control of achieving success even if they are not.

These socio-psychological insights nuance the economic idea that uncertainty reduces motivation per se in the context of project disruption appraisal. The authors contribute to the behavioral project management literature and general attribution theory and help guide the allocation of resources during the recovery of failed projects.